(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- The La Rotonde brasserie in Paris has a storied past as a haunt for the likes of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Picasso, and Trotsky. This spring it’s back in the news for a different kind of guest: Emmanuel Macron, who took his entourage to La Rotonde after winning the first round of the presidential election on April 23.
The celebration and triumphant victory speech that preceded it struck many as premature, given that the 39-year-old political neophyte must still face Marine Le Pen of the far-right National Front in a runoff on May 7. The press criticized Macron as tone-deaf, #larotonde became a Twitter meme, and Le Pen pounced on the event as proof that Macron was an “elite Parisian” out of touch with traditional values. “Macron could find nothing better to do than to celebrate?” asks Thomas Guénolé, a professor of politics at the Sciences Po institute in Paris. “He needed to show himself as a statesman, and instead he comes across as a child king.”
The misstep is highly unlikely to cost Macron the presidency, because polls show him beating Le Pen by at least 20 percentage points. The greater risk is that it will tarnish his image with a divided electorate and weaken his hand in parliamentary elections in June. Former President Nicolas Sarkozy was dogged by fallout from a 2007 election night dinner at a glitzy restaurant on the Champs-Élysées that helped earn him the nickname “President Bling-Bling.”
And while Sarkozy had a ready-made majority in Parliament, Macron’s En Marche! (On the Move!) party was formed only a year ago and has no deputies. En Marche plans to field candidates in every district, but it’s unlikely to secure the 289 lower-house seats needed for a majority to enact Macron’s legislative program of wide-ranging labor reforms and lower corporate and payroll taxes. If he’s seen as politically clumsy, he’ll have trouble wooing members of the center-right Republicans and center-left Socialists to back any eventual coalition government. After the first round, Macron “lacked gravitas, he looked too satisfied,” Socialist Party head Jean-Christophe Cambadélis, who’s endorsed Macron, said on RTL radio on April 25.
The National Front holds only two seats in the lower house, but it’s likely to win more in June. Le Pen got almost 22 percent of the vote on April 23, up from the 2012 election, when she placed third in the initial round with 17 percent. Stubbornly high unemployment and a series of deadly terror attacks have strengthened her hand in some traditionally leftist regions, and her lifetime of political experience—her father founded the National Front—may give her a tactical edge over Macron. He’s known as a whiz kid who excelled at top schools and worked as an investment banker before serving as economy minister under Socialist President François Hollande, but he’s never been elected to political office.
Another risk is meddling by hackers. Macron’s campaign has been targeted by cyberattacks similar to those used to infiltrate the Democratic National Committee in Washington last year, according to Trend Micro Inc. The cybersecurity consultant said the hackers used a technique known as spearphishing, sending emails appearing to come from Macron’s official website, with attachments that would install spyware if opened. En Marche has confirmed five such attacks since January, but says no campaign data was compromised, and it says staffers generally communicate via encrypted messaging systems rather than email.
Le Pen was quick to display her street-fighting skills after Macron’s election night dinner, touring downtrodden areas of northern France to bolster her image as a woman of the people. “This is obviously not La Rotonde,” she said at a market in Rouvroy, a town where she gathered almost 43 percent of the vote. On April 26, she made an unannounced stop at a Whirlpool Corp. plant in Macron’s hometown, Amiens, shortly before he was scheduled to visit. When he arrived, he was greeted by a hostile crowd. The factory is slated to lose 280 jobs as production shifts to Poland—evidence, Le Pen said, that Macron is selling out French workers by supporting “savage globalization.”
Macron contends France can benefit from international trade if the government helps companies respond to competition and provides better education and training to workers. “Le Pen’s project will fix nothing of the Whirlpool problem,” he told reporters in Amiens, noting that a local Procter & Gamble Co. plant exports 90 percent of its output.
If Macron prevails, the Republicans and Socialists may not be eager to back his government, says Mark Leonard, director of the European Council on Foreign Relations in Brussels. While presidential candidates from both parties were knocked out in the first round and asked their supporters to vote for Macron, their deputies in Parliament may be reluctant to work with him for fear of strengthening his nascent party. Undermining Macron, though, would probably do more to help Le Pen than either of the traditional parties—and Leonard says it could bolster an eventual presidential bid in 2022 by Le Pen. “It’s a choice between death by asphyxiation or by drowning,” he says. “In the end I suspect some will peel off to join Macron and others will oppose him.”—With Helene Fouquet and Mark Deen
The bottom line: Even if he beats Le Pen on May 7, Macron may have trouble finding support in Parliament for his agenda.
To contact the authors of this story: Carol Matlack in Paris at cmatlack@bloomberg.net, Marc Champion in London at mchampion7@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: David Rocks at drocks1@bloomberg.net.
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